To reduce FRC/dithering: I have a greyscale colour filter set to 50%
Wow, it never occurred to me that simply putting on a greyscale filter would reduce FRC/dithering. It makes sense to me, since panels use FRC/dithering to adjust how colors look, taking those colors away would reduce that effect. I'm bewildered this never occurred to me LOL
I have a history of neck and back stiffness, which started around the same time as my eye strain problems. This used to be a significant issue, but daily yoga has made it completely manageable.
I think it's the other way around. I think your eye strain problems came from when your neck and back stiffness started rather than vice versa. I say this because all my eye strain related issues (fatigue using screens, inability to tolerate lights coming off screens, etc) came when my nick stiffness came on 3 years ago. Like it came literally the neck day I messed up my neck. So I'm lucky in the sense that I have a clear indication of what the core issue is for me.
The neck and eyes are heavily connected via the vestibular and occular system. So many nerve pathways are interconnected there in this very small area that any amount of compression is likely to irritate the nerves and cause issues (that we have). I theorize that even if you fixed it enough that is manageable on the day to day, it's still not fully healed/resolved which still leaves a lot of nerve irritation/inflammation happening that just isn't healing. I suspect this is what is holding me back as well and why I'm not making a full recovery despite making significant progress this year by fixing my seb derm (which is an inflammatory condition in that same region), changing my diet to a low vA diet like Grant Genereux which heavily reduced overall body inflammation for me, and switching my hardware/software setup (to a CCFL-backlit monitor and using windows 10 1809 instead of windows 11).
You mention having an obsessive nature. To send you down a rabbit hole of health and give you a complete paradigm shift on everything you've learned, I want to direct your towards the work of Grant Genereux, researcher Anthony Mawson, and Dr. Garrett Smith. To sum quickly, Grant was suffering from eczema, chronic kidney disease, and other health ailments (chronic fatigue, insomnia, etc) and basically reverse engineered his way into discovering he had vitamin A toxicity that caused all of this. He tried to get the intake of vitamin A in his diet as low as possible and reversed all his health issues. He's been on that same low vitamin A diet for now 10 years and is in great health. His blood levels have showed he has a "deficiency" of "vitamin" A for 6-7 years now, which shows two things - 1. We don't need any "vitamin" A to live. 2. It took him 3-4 years to deplete all the vitamin A in his liver to reach a deficiency in the blood, so it builds up in the system and takes a really long time to deplete. Grant writes extensively about his health (including eye health) on his blog - ggenereux.blog. I recommended starting with reading his free ebooks that are available, as well as watching his interviews on Youtube.
Him, Garrett, and Anthony Mawson all believe vitamin A is not essential and that the early rat studies done on vitamin A are flawed. The "vitamin A free diets" they would feed rats would be deficient in zinc and taurine, and it was actually VERY high in vitamin A in the form of retinoic acid, considered the active form of vitamin A that they never test for (they only test retinol and caratenoids). It was the lack of zinc and taurine that destroyed eye health and the high vitamin A in the most destructive form (retinoic acid). Retinoic acid is also synonymous with Isotretinoin, which is what the drug Accutane is. When they give you Accutane, you are taking the active form of "vitamin" A. Look into "Accutane horror story", "Accutane ruined my life", etc to see what taking the direct, most potent form of "vitamin" A can do to destroy the body. Look into how many people report having photophobia after taking accutane. The vitamin A destroyed their eyes.
I've been on the low vitamin A diet for 8 months now and have seen major improvements - can now tolerate screens much longer now before fatigue sets in, feel more resilient, higher pain tolerance, much more emotional stability (feel like not much bothers me anymore), have way less sinus congestion, feel happier, feel more like me, like if I were a window that was stained and dirty, I feel like that window is starting to become clean and all that grime that was attached to it is being washed away, and I overall feel less inflamed. I also can tolerate lights not from screens now. When my neck issues and subsequent eye related issues first came on, I could not be outside in sunlight. It would absolutely wreck my energy levels. And even once the initial neck injury calmed down, I still couldn't handle walking out at the park at night with all the LED's or even sunset and the sun being at that angle hitting my eyes more (rather than the scalp which it does during the day when it's higher in the sky). I would feel fatigue for 15 minutes after going outside during those times. Keep in mind I never took accutane, never really got into eating liver (which is high in vitamin A), etc. It's just so ubiquitous that even if you didn't focus on intaking it, you likely have an excess of it that is causing your body issues. Once you start adding up your daily total intake, especially from ways it sneaks in (for instance, pasta noodles are said to have 0 IU of vitamin A but durum wheat semolina is very yellow which means it has beta-carotene, which is vitamin A, giving it that yellow color) and you remember that it's a fat-soluble molecule that builds up in the system, you can see how this molecule just builds up overtime in the body.
In the future I will make an extensive post on the topic. Not sure yet if I can advise people to do the diet, as that entails a responsibility to people's health, which I'm not really comfortable with. But I hope I got some gears turning for some people who read this, and helped direct you towards a path that gets you healing. Btw many people with autism who do the diet report that their ASD symptoms lessen overtime. They report feeling less obsessive about things, a better tolerance to lights and loud noises, and a stronger propensity to make eye contact with others. You can hear the testimonials on Garrett Smith's Youtube channel (Nutrition Detective) under the 'Live' tab. You can read them too if you join the LYL network that he has, though that is paywalled, so I suggest first just starting with reading Grant's blog/books, listening to interviews of him, and then moving over to Nutrition Detective livestreams. There is tons of content out there on this between the two of them to get you started down this rabbit hole. Any questions you have, feel free to reach out to me.